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Sights and sounds, but not much science (yet)

Matt Shupe signing on to the Oliktok blog for the first time, and looking forward to some great days here on the North Slope.

I’ve been to the Arctic many times, under many conditions…. and it never stops providing amazing experiences. The science has been pretty slow around here, with high winds keeping the tethered balloon system grounded until tomorrow and nothing more to prepare. As we wait for science there have been some great sights and sounds that are uniquely Arctic. A late morning sunrise into a cloudy sky, accompanied by a deep breath in the frosty wind (ok, maybe the wind is not so unique compared to my home in the Colorado mountains!).

How about a couple caribou lounging in the tundra as the freeze up starts to set in?

Those were are couple sites of the last few days; but what does the Arctic sound like? Today we had a brief opportunity to walk out on the tundra. It is totally inundated with water. Ponds, streams, soggy wet soil and grasses. Over the past couple of days it has all started to freeze. So walking around the tundra is a cracky, creaky experience. I didn’t get wet at all, but the shallow ice and frozen grasses certainly made a lot of sound underfoot.

These have been a couple of fun experiences over the past days, but I’m really looking forward to making some measurements in the coming days. Ready to bring out a big balloon tomorrow and measure the atmospheric turbulence that is driven by cloud radiation (more on that in the coming days!).

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Unmanned Aircraft on Alaska’s North Slope, part 3

CIRES scientist Gijs de Boer, who works in NOAA’s Physical Sciences Division, will work with a team of University of Colorado Boulder scientists and engineers at Oliktok Point, Alaska from 10-22 October to deploy the DataHawk unmanned aircraft system (UAS). This UAS was developed and instrumented in collaboration with the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) in CU-Boulder's Aerospace Engineering department, and is being deployed in collaboration with the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) CU "Grand Challenge" effort. The purpose of these flights is to obtain measurements of thermodynamic properties of the lower atmosphere, including information on the exchange of energy between the Earth’s surface and the overlying air during the initial formation of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean. Data collected during these flights will aid in understanding Arctic climate and processes critical to sea ice formation. In addition to the DataHawk activities, CIRES/PSD scientist Matthew Shupe and NCAR scientist Carl Schmitt will deploy instruments on a tethered balloon system operated by the US Department of Energy’s ARM program. And—the team will deploy a turbulence probe developed at the University of Leeds, an ice crystal imager developed at NCAR, and an aerosol spectrometer developed in the NOAA Chemical Sciences Division. These sensors will provide information on the structure of the atmosphere, clouds and precipitation, and the aerosol particles that go into cloud formation. Follow our work, funded by the US Department of Energy and supported by CIRES, NOAA, CU and NCAR, on this blog!